Posted on 06/15/2007 8:50:27 AM PDT by DogByte6RER
1918 KURT WALDHEIM 2007
Former leader of U.N., Austria hid ties to Nazis
By Jonathan Kandell
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE
June 15, 2007
Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. secretary-general and president of Austria whose hidden ties to Nazi organizations and war crimes were exposed late in his career, died yesterday at his home in Vienna. He was 88.
Although it was never proved that Waldheim himself committed atrocities during World War II, he was a lieutenant in army intelligence attached to German military units that executed thousands of Yugoslav partisans and civilians and deported thousands of Greek Jews to death camps between 1942 and 1944.
Waldheim concealed his wartime service in the Balkans, saying his military career ended in 1942, after he was wounded on the Russian front. But more than four decades later, his assertions were contradicted by eyewitnesses, photographs, medals and commendations given to Waldheim, and by his own signature on documents linked to massacres and deportations.
“Kurt Waldheim did not, in fact, order, incite, or personally commit what is commonly called a war crime,” wrote University of South Carolina historian Robert Edwin Herzstein, whose research was crucial in uncovering Waldheim's Nazi past. “But this non-guilt must not be confused with innocence. The fact that Waldheim played a significant role in military units that unquestionably committed war crimes makes him at the very least morally complicit in those crimes.”
By 1948, the U.N. War Crimes Commission listed Waldheim as a suspected war criminal subject to trial. Yet no government pressed to bring him to account or even to reveal his history.
According to a bipartisan letter from Congress sent to President Clinton in 1998, the CIA was aware of Waldheim's wartime record years before he stood for election as U.N. secretary-general.
Waldheim served two terms as secretary-general from 1972 to 1982.
It was not until he later ran for president of Austria that his wartime past became widely known. During his campaign, political opponents, investigative journalists, historians and the World Jewish Congress uncovered evidence of Waldheim's involvement with Nazism as a student and his wartime role in the Balkans.
But the revelations were met by a nationalist, anti-Semitic backlash in Austria that aided Waldheim's election. Many Austrians identified with his attempts to deny complicity with the Nazis and to view himself as a citizen of a nation occupied by German invaders and forced into their military service. He became a soldier in Hitler's army, Waldheim insisted, “just as hundreds of thousands of other Austrians did their duty.”
In 1955, Waldheim was named Austria's first permanent representative to the United Nations. In 1968, with Bruno Kreisky as chancellor of Austria, Waldheim became his foreign minister.
Three years later, when U Thant stepped down as secretary-general, the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union backed Waldheim for the post. He became secretary-general in 1972 and won another five-year term in 1977.
Waldheim was criticized as being ineffective and too willing to cave in to pressure. Western countries complained that he had failed to pressure Vietnam to abandon its military occupation of Cambodia, and the United States and Israel said he was not evenhanded in the Middle East.
Waldheim endorsed Palestinian statehood without mentioning Israel's right to exist, and when an Israeli commando unit rescued hostages at Entebbe, Uganda in 1976, he called it “a serious violation of the national sovereignty of a United Nations member state.”
Waldheim left the United Nations after it became clear that he had no support for a third term. He returned to Austria and retired from the foreign ministry in 1984.
Wasn't this the same Uganda that was ruled by the cannibalistic despot Idi Amin?
Kurt Waldheim...from Nazi to the United Nations. What a smooth transition.
Burn in Hell, Waldheim.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1850713/posts
Robert Fisk: Disgraced UN chief and Nazi war criminal Waldheim, dies aged 88
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1833916/posts
11-nation commission agrees to start transferring Nazi archive to Holocaust researchers
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1850701/posts
Russia declassifies military archives dating back to 1941-1945
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1850727/posts
Second World War MI5 documents revealed
I wonder if Howard Stern will talk to Kurt Waldheim Jr, today?
One less Nazi scum in the world, and that’s a good thing.
Wonderful - but when do we bring the first Commie to justice for the deaths of 100 million in the last century?
http://victimsofcommunism.org/
Agreed...
I cite the same number that was estimated in “The Black Book of Communism”
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Book-Communism-Crimes-Repression/dp/0674076087
( Inside joke)
See #5
Many Austrians identified with his attempts to deny complicity with the Nazis and to view himself as a citizen of a nation occupied by German invaders and forced into their military service. He became a soldier in Hitler's army, Waldheim insisted, “just as hundreds of thousands of other Austrians did their duty.”
Three years later, when U Thant stepped down as secretary-general, the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union backed Waldheim for the post. He became secretary-general in 1972 and won another five-year term in 1977.
Austria's greatest triumph? Convincing the world that Hitler was a German.
The Iron Curtain hidden all communist atrocities until the perpetrates were all dead, property all stolen and 100 million people killed.
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